mostly because rancher is extra complexity for little extra benefit. Both our infra and our apps _must_ be "As Code", so the webui(s) are only going to be useful for visualization - they are ~readonly.

remember rancher started as a sort of abstraction layer between various container scheduling approaches. well, now that we've picked k8s instead of swarm/mesos/whatever, we no longer need that abstraction/portability

we're not currently using helm, just writing (generating/templating) k8s manifests directly, although I believe someone in my org is looking into it. Does helm provide a powerful&useful abstraction layer/DSL around the k8s API? I haven't looked into it because when I first heard of it, it was made out [to me] to be just syntactic sugar for newbies so I kinda ignored it. Is that a mistake?